On Valentine’s Day, an anonymous researcher announced a previously undisclosed SMB (Server Message Block) vulnerability affecting the CIFS (Common Internet File System) browser service. Along with the vulnerability, the researcher also posted Proof-of-Concept (PoC) exploit code showing exactly how to exploit the vulnerability, triggering a blue screen in kernel mode.

Considering the issue was disclosed without providing any time for remediation or a patch, we analyzed the vulnerability and immediately released edge-based protection (Vuln:Win/SMB.Browser.DoS!NIS-2011-0003) for our Forefront Threat Management Gateway customers. Luckily, the PoC was not fully weaponized (that is, it was not designed to achieve remote code execution, just a denial of service) although it has been reported as being a remote code execution vulnerability. Our colleagues at SRD have analyzed the vulnerability and drawn conclusions as to whether RCE is possible and under what circumstances. Their blog has the details.

Let’s talk a little bit more about this vulnerability and the consequences of exploiting this issue. As stated by the researcher who disclosed it, the vulnerability is inside an error-reporting function of the CIFS browser service module. The function gets a variable number of arguments as parameters. Those string arguments are pushed on the stack for processing. In some cases, some of the strings can be controlled by the attacker.

An attacker triggers the vulnerability by causing multiple string arrays to be concatenated. The target buffer to which the concatenated string arrays are pushed has a pre-allocated fixed size. When the remaining target buffer length becomes 0, the string copy loop should exit, but it does not. The length is decremented by one more before the actual string copy instructions are executed, which is intended to reserve the string’s NULL termination. Suddenly, the length of the string to be copied becomes a huge number due to the integer underflow. The next string copy operation will attempt to copy an extremely large number of bytes from the source address to the target buffer, and then the overflow ensues.

Our conclusion is that the part of the string that the attacker can control will always end up inside the allocated buffer, and the part the attacker can’t control is in the part that overflows the buffer. Also, it is not possible to control the length of data to overwrite, so that it’s always the same (and predictable) huge integer value. As a result, we don’t (yet) see how RCE can happen.

In any case, our coverage was released late on Valentine’s Day right around the time most of you were (hopefully) enjoying your Valentine’s Day desserts.